On Todays Show

Founder of Open Transactions and Monetas, long time cypherpunk Chris Odom speaks about decentralization and the OT project. OpenTransactions is not explicitly bitcoin, rather it is an interlocking piece that lets you take the very secure and difficult to censor digital token and make it more useful.

We'll have Chris Odom on as a guest-host in March so consider this your primer that will allow us to skip most of the basics and talk about the more interesting future stuff.

Sponsors for Episode 183

If you€™d like to support the Let€™s Talk Bitcoin! show beyond tipping, you can visit LetsTalkBitcoin.com and click the €œSponsor€ button at the top of the page.

Today I€™m pleased to announce another new Tokenly tool, now available for use on the letstalkbitcoin.com community platform. If you visit http://ift.tt/1CYPIEn, or click the Buy button in the menu you€™ll be taken to our LTBCOIN swapbot. A swapbot is like an automated token vending machine, you send Bitcoin or another token that is accepted to a bitcoin address and a corresponding amount of whatever you€™re buying will be sent back to you.

One of the cool features we€™ve built into swapbot is the ability to accept as many types of tokens at you want, each able to have a different price discount or premium associated with it, so you€™ll see when you visit http://ift.tt/1CYPIEn that you can buy LTBCOIN with STORJ€™s coin, SWARM and Counterpartys native token, XCP in what will be a growing list. While we give big discounts to LTBCOIN because its the coin of our ecosystem, we accept newer, less popular or useful coins like the ones I just mentioned at a slight premium, 10% above the bitcoin price.

For now only official LTB administered tokens are being listed, but soon we€™ll open it up. We consider this particular swapbot our automated retail outlet, mostly intended to let you trade your LTBCOIN for SPONSOR, LTBDISPLAY or my pre-paid time tokens. However since you do get the best value on anything else in our ecosystem with LTBCOIN by a substantial margin, we do offer LTBCOIN through our vending machine as well at a 20% premium to whatever the market price is. Although it€™s open to whomever for use, we€™d rather people trading for profit to use exchanges and contribute to the ecosystem by being part of price discovery.

If you€™d like to check out our first swapbot vending machine in all its prototype glory, head to http://ift.tt/1CYPIEn

If you're a developer, you might be interested in our Coins-for-Commits program. As the platform goes open source in the coming weeks we'd like as much help as possible and you'll earn 10,000LTBc per commit that is accepted. You can find the github repository here

Reddit.com is host to many diverse and fascinating subreddits, created and monitored by the community. The following article discusses one of my favorite subreddits.

My Introduction to BitTippers

My morning routine is to eat a bowl of cereal, make a cup of coffee, and sit and surf my favorite Bitcoin-related sites before work. It was one of these typical mornings sometime last year when I stumbled across a small subreddit called "BitTippers." There were only a handful of subscribers, but it intrigued me. I had discovered the wonder of ChangeTip about a month before and had quickly become obsessed with sending tips to charities, and mostly to strangers on Reddit! The concept of the BitTippers subreddit was to create giveaway contests where could people post comments and you could reward them with a couple of bits worth of Bitcoin via the ChangeTip bot. The BitTipper community was small, but comprised of Bitcoin fans with fun personalities and witty senses of humor.

I've been a redditor for five years and the BitTippers sub rapidly became my favorite hangout replacing the time I spent previously looking at /r/diy or /r/listentothis and even /r/bitcoin!The first task for any new BitTipper is to get some flair, and the initial tag you get is something like "NewGuy010115". The cool thing about the sub is that if and when you host your own Bitcoin giveaway, you get bumped up one level. It creates a nice culture of giving, combined with an element of competition!

The Basic Rules of the Community

BitTipper Rules: No begging posts. Please do not ask for tips. Keep it clean. Don't post anything you wouldn't want your granny to see.BitTippers welcomes you to enter some competitions and giveaways and hopefully you will be tipped some bits. But please remember without people tipping then this sub will soon die so please remember to make your own posts and share the bits with others. - BitTippers Community Rules

The founder of the sub goes by the handle "IvorBigHead." Mr. H, as I call him, managed to grow the community through hard work and some smart decision making, especially when it came to enforcing rules and a code of conduct. I had the recent pleasure of picking his brain about the creation of the community.

A Word from the Founder /u/IvorBigHead

BitTippers was a kind of dumb idea! I had been on reddit a while, somehow stumbled into /r/dogecoin and found I loved the friendliness of the place, the community was great, powered by tipping.Of course dogecoin led me to checkout /r/bitcoin but OMG that sub sucked!!! I was used to coins being a great new innovative idea, fun and excitement. /r/bitcoin was so serious and if you as so much mentioned dogecoin and tipping you were soon informed that dogecoin was full of kids throwing pennies at each other and that if you were going to tip it had to be a minimum of $1, $5 etc. Then I found changetip, not many sub's back then lol, bashco was working on the CSS getting the upvote coin to flip, I got a couple tips :) Fun comes to Bitcoin !!One day for no other reason than I was a little bored, I created a subreddit and found it it was really easy. I started thinking about properly trying to set up a new sub.I wanted a sub that had the "fun" of the good old days of doge combined with a place were new guys could "easily" get some Bitcoin bits to experiment with.So BitTippers was created.To start with it was just me posting, I tried to do a couple a day. A few good people joined but it was not long before it became clear there was a big problem.The same problem doge had, alt accounts, bot accounts, people just commenting 1 word answers to everything marked "giveaway" without a single tip from them. I posted something about it in /r/bitcoin and one guy replied that "BitTippers would only survive for as long as I was prepared to give coin away" it made sense, I had to in courage people to tip, I had to remove the guys who continuly refused to tip. The flair system started :)Bittippers continues to grow, sometimes I do struggle to keep the posts approved and the Flair's updated though, today is a perfect example, I still [have] not updated today's flairs, they will have to wait until tonight!!Not sure what else to say :) - IvorBigHead

I also had the pleasure of chatting with one of the BitTippers community moderators, /u/Not-My-Real-Name-.

BitTippers Moderator /u/Not-My-Real-Name-

BitTippers is a pretty awesome part of reddit. One of my most memorable moments early on was a post by IvorBigHead about tea and biscuits. I€™ll let you read the exchange:http://ift.tt/1yjE55pNot only did we have a nice exchange (and I won a few bits), but I went out, bought the tea and biscuits and tried them per his recommendations. It was good too!The big challenge is to come up with contests. The first few are always the hardest. What I have found is that the best/most fun challenges tend to be ones that come up spontaneously. The biggest reward for me is getting to know people I would otherwise never meet. There are some really great people who contribute to the sub.As a moderator it's a pretty easy community to work with. IvorBigHead did a great job setting up the whole thing. Our biggest challenge is trying to prevent alt accounts from overrunning the sub and ruining it. Anytime money is involved people tend to get a little crazy. The €œflair€ plays a big part in that. If a user takes and takes but doesn't give, they will end up on the wrong end of a ban notice.One of the biggest things that often gets overlooked by many is the technology behind the sub; Bitcoin and Changetip allows us to send money to people we have never met, with little security risk, anywhere in the world. That€™s mind boggling for someone who graduated from high school before email was a thing!Cheers! - NotMy

Each week there is a vote for BitTipper of the Week (BTOTW) and the community crowns a new king or queen. Sometimes there are community contributions of bits for the winner, but the amount varies from one week to the next. The wonderful Victoria Van Eyk from ChangeTip recently started sponsoring the weekly prize fund for the BitTipper of the Week contest, and the prize fund is now very respectable each week!

The members of the community are what make it so special. I ran a BitTippers giveaway to see what folks love the most about the sub. Here is a small selection of the many responses.

/u/StrikeouTX BitTipper Lev 24

I like the spirit of competition, the ability to share, and the influences gained from people all over the world in the atmosphere of a small community!

/u/drsjsmith BitTipper Lev 11

(I love) The camaraderie among the higher-level folks, and the welcome extended to newer BitTippers. Also, /u/ivorbighead's combination of friendliness and no-nonsense attitude.

/u/velociralex BitTipper Lev 13 (aka Sherlock)

I love how accepted I feel in the community and how I actually have friends on here that I can talk to.

/u/dranalli23 BitTipper Lev 18

I like how we formed a community of giving, and hopefully inspire new people to not only do this online, but in everyday life as well.

/u/quiksaaand BitTipper Lev 1

It's a fun sub that actually shows the good of people, it may not be alot of money given out but the act speaks volumes. It is also a great way for people new to bitcoin to get use the the use of the currency. For instance, from using changtip I set up my bitcoin wallet and have become more familiar with bitcoin.

/u/LightOneCandleBitTipper Lev 27 (and a bloody good fella)

It's a small enough community that we (sort of) get to know one another, and it's focused on generosity. I love the precise degree to which the mods are tough on people who don't give back (not too tough, not too lenient.) I love seeing what interesting giveaways people come up with. (I only wish I were not out of ideas!) And I love the people who are here.

/u/xblux New Guy 17/12/14

This sub shows the generosity and fluffy hearts of humans all over the world with a good way to introduce BTC to everyone. I see many who created accounts in BTC just by coming in here accidentally.

I'm sure there are many communitys of Bitcoin tippers that have formed, just like /r/BitTippers, thanks to the "Love Button for the Internet" that ChangeTip has created, but I think it is also the special magic that IvorBigHead and his wonderful team of moderators has created that makes this little-known community of BitTippers so much fun!

Many thanks for reading. If you would like to join the BitTippers community, or just lurk, here is the link:

GoCoin has added three new fiat currencies as payout options for merchants – euros, pound sterling and Singapore dollars.

The announcements come amid a string of new details about the company’s business progress. Since raising $550,000 in November 2013, GoCoin has arguably become a big-three payment processor alongside BitPay and Coinbase due to its agnostic approach to digital currencies, accepting litecoin and dogecoin alongside bitcoin.

The statement is just an excerpt from one of the 39 formal complaints filed with the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) against now-bankrupt bitcoin mining company CoinTerra and revealed in a new Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

It's no secret that the bitcoin community can be divided when it comes to the topic of regulation – some believe it's necessary to bring bitcoin to the mainstream and others believe that bitcoin was built specifically to circumvent regulation.

Algorithmic cryptocurrency trading platform Tradewave has launched a new tool which will enable "average" traders to create their own bitcoin trading bots without using code.

Previously users could only use programming language Python to execute trading strategies. However, the new product opens up the automated platform to bitcoin trading newcomers or those without programming ability.

Toronto-based gold and bitcoin startup BitGold has gone public following a reverse merger with mineral exploration company Loma Vista Capital.

BitGold will retain its name, but halt trading on the Canadian National Stock Exchange as it migrates to the Toronto Stock Exchange. As part of the deal, the company said it will raise C$6m in subscription receipt private placement, with an additional C$5m worth of warrants to be exercised later.

Huobi, one of China's 'Big Three' exchanges, says it is making international growth its top priority in 2015, and has launched incentives for overseas customers to use its USD trading platform BitYes.

All USD deposit methods will be free until 31st March. This includes OKPAY, AstroPay, Mayzus, Payza and Skrill Online Bank Transfer (OBT).

BitYes will also implement a temporary 'maker-taker' trading fee structure, rewarding those who set limit orders. The 'maker' (limit order) fee will be 0% and 'taker' (market order) fees will range from 0.2% to 0.08% depending on previous 30-day trading volume. This fee structure is effective until 28th February.

The New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) has issued a new statement indicating Coinbase has not yet secured a license to operate in New York.

The remarks, relayed by a spokesman to The New York Times, suggest that the department, which is currently working on a final version of its BitLicense regulation, is still in talks with Coinbase about its legal status in the state, but that no decisions have been finalized.

Chris Mountford is a developer at Atlassian, a software company based in Australia and has been interested in digital currency for over twenty years. In this episode we discuss reputation and personal information management systems. Chris' ability to identify the issues and dangers of various approaches make him an excellent expositor.

Chris Mountford is a developer at Atlassian, a software company based in Australia and has been interested in digital currency for over twenty years. In this episode we discuss reputation and personal information management systems.Chris' ability to identify the issues and dangers of various approaches make him an excellent commentator.

Anycoin Direct has raised €500,000 as part of a seed round backed by a private investor.

The Netherlands-based bitcoin brokerage announced the deal on 21st January, a move that coincided with its expansion to the Canadian market. Anycoin Direct offers users the ability to buy and sell digital currencies including bitcoin, dogecoin and darkcoin, among others.

Credits for Episode 182

If you're a developer, you might be interested in our Coins-for-Commits program. As the platform goes open source in the coming weeks we'd like as much help as possible and you'll earn 10,000LTBc per commit that is accepted. You can find the github repository here

London, January 24, 2015 — LazyCoins demoed their killer Bitcoin app LazyPay at the BitcoinExpo 2015 in London last weekend. The company has spent months carefully and quietly planning to take the app public. Including running the payment and merchant services app through testing with a security firm. And holding Q&As in order to perfect their software and get everything right before debuting to the world.

The free conference ran from January 24–25 at the Central Foundation Boys’ School on Cowper Street, London. LazyCoins Founder and CEO Danial Daychopan calls London, “a great place for bitcoin businesses and entrepreneurs.”

Daychopan began his talk at the conference on the importance of security. He stressed this is the number one focus for both their exchange and their merchant services app, to guarantee “rock solid security” for their users.

LazyCoins announced the beta version of their new exchange six months ago in July, but they chose not to go public right away in order to learn from and avoid the mistakes of other exchanges. They launch in direct competition with similar-service industry leaders BitPay and Coinbase.

The goal with the LazyPay app is to make Bitcoin use a part of everyday life, increasing its volume of use in the in-person merchant market, getting more people to use digital currencies as a form of payment, rather than just as a speculative investment tool.

Their secure mobile wallet and user-friendly merchant app aim to make doing business in digital currencies simple and safe for both merchants and customers. The aim is to “make buying and selling goods as easy with bitcoin as it is with cash and credit cards—only faster, safer and more convenient.”

The average person needs to be able to find more places to spend bitcoin, they don’t know how to obtain it, and transactions seem too complex. Lack of education among retailers and the lack of an easy-to-use, trusted merchant platform are also problems.

LazyCoins and LazyPay are designed to fix such issues, with security at the top of their priorities. Cold storage wallets and two-factor authentication for accounts, fingerprint access for the app, and multi signature keys are just some of the many features. And a policy of crediting a merchant account on the day of their transactions, by the exact amount that the user pays, will eliminate the risk of price fluctuations.

They are on a mission to sign up merchants and educate them on the benefits and ease of accepting Bitcoin. The app is free, offers zero-transaction fees, daily direct payments to bank accounts and no chargebacks. LazyPay will demonstrate how credits cards are slower, riskier and more expensive in comparison. Operating the app will be intuitive for the non-tech person; easier than using a cash register or credit card point-of-sale terminal.

On top of all these features, the app will include a live, automatically updated map showing the locations of local Bitcoin merchants and businesses. It will offer NFC-enabled payments for super fast POS transactions, the ability to buy and sell bitcoin from the app and a direct in-app link to bank accounts. And the merchant will require no hardware and not be asked to sign contracts or make any commitments.

“We’re on a mission,” says Daychopan, “to spread the word and sign up as many merchants as we can. And London is our chosen starting point for this crypto-crusade… Then we can give those Silicon Valley lot a run for their (digital) money,” becoming “a dominant force in crypto.”

Adam Ludwin co-founded Chain.com, a bitcoin developer platform. Prior to Chain, Adam was a venture investor in companies including Vine, Slack, Kik, and Paperless Post. In this post he addresses the distinction between privacy and anonymity in bitcoin.

Bitcoin is often described as a way to transact anonymously. But just how anonymous is it?

Bitstamp's recent hacking woes suggest that security in the bitcoin world seems to be getting worse, rather than better. Whether it's down to external attacks, or internal irregularities as alleged at Mt Gox, it's clear that something has to change.

When bitcoin wallet Blockchain experienced its own security problems in December, decentralised cryptography expert Emin Gün Sirer noted that the standard security practices among technology companies would not stand up in the bitcoin world.

Too much was at stake, he said. Social media companies may hold pictures of your pets, but your bitcoin account holds something more valuable. It seems reasonable that the cryptocurrency world should be held to a higher level of account than, say, Twitter (although a hacked Twitter account can still have pretty devastating results).

Credits for Episode 181

If you're a developer, you might be interested in our Coins-for-Commits program. As the platform goes open source in the coming weeks we'd like as much help as possible and you'll earn 10,000LTBc per commit that is accepted. You can find the github repository here

In this SovereignBTC podcast, John Bush delivers a comprehensive review of the first two weeks of the Ross Ulbricht Trial. He reads from an article he wrote for Tech Crunch as well as the daily reports he published for week two proceedings.

Indiegogo Fundraiser to Send News Team to NYC to Cover Rest of the Trial

John also informs the audience about their recently launched IndieGogo fundraising campaign to help raise monies to have the Liberty Beat team covering the rest of the trial from New York City. John was on the ground for week one and a Liberty Beat reporter covered every day of the trial. So far the Liberty Beat team has produced around two dozen articles, audio piece, interviews, and videos about the trial.

Help us continue our work bringing you a cutting edge perspective on this trial not presented elsewhere.

The campaign has great perks like the "I am Dread Pirate Roberts" t-shirt and a custom usb jump drive with a Silk Road camel logo that contains trial research, articles, and a TOR/encryption starter pack.

"Because I trust his integrity and professionalism, John Bush is the only journalist I interviewed with the first week of Ross' trial. I look forward to more of his good work." - Lyn Ulbricht

"Liberty Beat has done a fantastic job covering the Ross Ulbricht trial. The world is a more informed place thanks to their work." - Roger Ver

Announcing the Sale of 2,000,000 LTBc!

John is also pleased to announce the sale of 2,000,000 LTBc to help raise monies for travel expenses to cover the Ulbricht Trial. For the next four days, you can purchase one LTBc for 200 satoshis (.00000200 BTC). At the time of the recording of this podcast, one LTBc was trading at 166 satoshis with a daily high of 199. Now is your chance to obtain a large amount of LTBc while supporting a good cause!

If you are interested, comment below, private message me at sovBTC, or connect with me on Twitter @sovbtc.

Watch the Exclusive Video Interview with Lyn Ulbricht

While at the trial during week one, John recorded an exclusive interview with Lyn Ulbricht, Ross' mother and biggest advocate. To watch the interview on WatchMyBit's bitcoin only video system, click here. It costs $.10 in btc to watch the video and 95% of the proceeds go to the Ross Ulbricht Legal Defense Fund.

CHECK OUT OUR SPONSORS!

Beata.WatchMyBit.com - We have partnered with WatchMyBit to bring you exclusive daily video updates from the Silk Road Trial. Visit the site and give their bitcoin paywall a try. Proceeds from the trial videos will go to support the Ross Ulbricht Legal Defense Fund.

Third-party payment processor EgoPay suffered a hack in late December, the company has confirmed in a blog post.

The post claims the person or persons involved interfered with over a million transactions.

Explaining more about the hack, EgoPay writes: "False values were made available in the merchants platform, when no actual value was transmitted in EgoPay. This hacker then proceeded to convert this fake value into irreversible currencies all within a one-hour window. These merchants believed that this value was in their EgoPay account, but unfortunately it was not."